Introduction

After you have installed Community Server on a local server, you might need to change your network settings so that your online office will be accessible over a local network or the Internet.

Here are some brief instructions on how to configure your network interface specifying the parameters that are necessary to establish a network connection, such as a network address, netmask, default gateway and DNS server that should be used (you can obtain these parameters from your system administrator or Internet provider).

lo (Local Loopback) - is used to establish a network connection to this machine (127.0.0.1), it does not require additional configuration.

To display the settings of a certain interface, use the ifconfig eth0 command, where eth0 is an interface name.

The ifconfig command also allows to configure the network settings, but the changes made in such a manner, will be reset to default when you restart your machine, so you can use them to temporarily configure the network for testing purposes. For example, you can use the following command to specify the primary IP address and netmask for the eth0 interface:

sudo ifconfig eth0 192.168.3.202 netmask 255.255.248.0 up

Configuring settings

To make the settings persistent, you need to change the network interfaces configuration file located at /etc/network/interfaces

Open it in a text editor:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

Your network interface is currently set for using DHCP, when the network addresses are being assigned automatically by a DHCP server. You can see the following settings for a dynamic IP:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

To set a static IP for the network interface, replace the 'dhcp' value with the 'static' one and add some other parameters so that the configuration will look like this: